Hurling is one of the world’s greatest sports and spectacles, and yet our relationship with it is dependent on geography. Ciarán Murphy is a Galway man, one of the country’s finest hurling counties, but where he was born determined his opportunities with the small and big ball games.
Murphy, who writes a Gaelic games column for The Irish Times, is from the east of the county, a stronghold for Gaelic football. He has kicked football all his life at different levels, and continues to do so in his 40s. But he never togged out for hurling even though he always had an affection for it, with his family’s strong ties to the game in Waterford.
So with a sense of coming full circle, last summer at the fine vintage of 42 years old Murphy decided to join Waterford’s An Sean Phobal (Old Parish), intending to hurl for the team of his father’s homeplace, in a club inextricably linked to his extended family. Anyone who has ever pucked a ball at All-Star at-the-beach grade, like I have, will be wishing Murphy well in his task; fully aware of the truth in Clare legend Ger Loughnane’s maxim that if you haven’t started hurling by the age of seven, it’s probably too late.
Murphy acknowledges this fundamental hurdle, but throws himself into the challenge with gusto, inspired by the idea of participatory sports journalism embodied by writers such as George Plimpton and Norman Mailer.
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So how does he fare? Better than expected: he does not sink without trace, get badly injured or pack it in from frustration. He seems to have enjoyed it, all things considered, as he relates his tale in a straightforward style, supplemented with various threads of Gaelic games’ social history (Murphy also reconnects with parish life and Gaeilge, which I would like to have read more on).
“I return again to that line from George Plimpton: did I capture my ‘perfect moment of total failure’? Was that even what I was looking for?” he writes, “I suppose I had wanted to play the game and understand it better, as a sporting endeavour and as a cultural monolith in our country, and in the five months since I’d started training with An Sean Phobal I’d discovered plenty.”
